


The Circus is Cheaper When it Rains

by orphan_account



Category: Batman (Comics)
Genre: Gen, i am sorry but i had to, this is fun-ruining, this will ruin all of your fun
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-01
Updated: 2018-06-01
Packaged: 2019-05-16 18:25:16
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,054
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14816531
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Objects in the mirror appear more pleasant than they were.





	The Circus is Cheaper When it Rains

**Author's Note:**

> _"The Circus is Cheaper When it Rains" by Iain S. Thomas_
> 
> _I've taken the same ride too many times._
> 
> _I could fall asleep in the loop._
> 
> _I know the clowns wipe the fake, makeup smiles off their faces once the show is done._
> 
> _I know the lions sleep in cages at night._
> 
> _I know the tightrope walkers have blisters on their feet._
> 
> _I know the ringmaster doesn't believe in what he yells to the crowd anymore._
> 
> _I know the strongman, isn't as strong as he once was._
> 
> _I know the candy floss has always been, just sugar and air._
> 
> _You are the only reason I come back here every night._

Haly’s finally got wise and bought an elephant around when Dick was born. While Dick learned the magic of sight and sound and the world of things he could stuff in his tiny little mouth, the elephant grew in the complex beside him, chained to the ground by her back foot. 

 

Having an infant and being on the road was a big hazard, but the Graysons were too valuable to let go. They were performers of another measure. They could easily double, possibly triple, the crowds of the performances they attended, so they were granted leave to weather out Dick’s early days in the winter hidey-hole, side-by-side with Haly’s newest treasure. 

 

“That calf came from a good bitch,” Haly would say, his beer spilling out of the edge of his cup, his words sloshing to the ground with it. No one had ever told Haly that they called female elephants  _ cows. _ Some thought he might just like to say  _ bitch.  _ “She’s good stock. She’ll make us a killin’, won’t you know. An absolute killin’.”

 

Dick’s parents would take him to visit the elephant, sometimes. The barn they kept her in wasn’t much like a barn, with hay and wood and dirt and long-legged Holstein cows. It had a gray concrete floor and a low gray concrete ceiling and the elephant was tied to a steel post by a chain around her ankle, and there was a lump of hay and a deep gray concrete trough she took water from. She weaved her head constantly, backnforth, backnforth, backnforth, the pace of a person with no room to do so.

 

“This is an elephant,” Mom said, with a grin. She held him up, so he could look the elephant in the eye. “We call her Zitka. Can you say  _ elephant?” _

 

“Mmgh,” Dick said. He reached out one chubby hand, laying it squarely on her broad face. Zitka rumbled. Mom moved to jerk him backward, but one tentative, little trunk curled up and sniffed experimentally at Dick’s fingers. Dick giggled. “Mmnh,” he said.

 

Zitka blew a long rush of air through her trunk, and it sounded like _ hello. _

 

It goes like this: elephants have the best _ hello,  _ and wait the longest to say  _ goodbye.  _ They age slowly. They’re mammals who put a lot of blood, sweat, and tears into one baby, increasing the population by inches rather than miles—marching ever steadily forward in long lines of gray-rippled spines. So Dick and Zitka grew up together, Dick beneath his mother and father’s touch and Zitka beneath her concrete. Dick visited her when he could, took to bringing her treats. She was always so quick to snatch them up with her trunk, always jerked forward when Dick came with something sweet and savory. So very quick. One Halloween, he snuck into town and bought her a whole pumpkin. Haly had about tanned his hide with some choice words about spoiling all of Zitka’s rigorous training, and Dick didn’t visit Zitka for a month. Once, she tried to drink her trainer’s coffee. A bullhook was jabbed above her eye.  _ My best friend in the whole wide world,  _ Dick had called her.

 

Here is how Dick was broken: his parents started contortion training early, agility earlier; their hands rough with callouses warm with love pull him from the ground when he falls, and he falls often; the day eventually comes where he doesn’t fall at all, and then it’s their eyes watching them from afar that sew him a safety net he carries on his back for the rest of his life; his hands white with powder swinging on the protesting bar; lights reflecting his sequin suit, yellow streaming behind him as he beams at a cheering crowd; a cackle flying high above the earth like the birds mock the Earth itself for being stationary. 

 

Here is how Zitka was broken: gray on gray on gray on gray; repeated figure-eight, the bobbing head and flopping trunk backnforthbacknforthbacknforth; when an elephant is old enough, they are tied to a post with a chain and beaten with a bullhook until that beam in their eye dies; a trainer only has to raise the hook to send fear spiral-draining through the heart; it only takes a hook jabbed in the soft flesh behind the ear to make two thousand pounds of wild animal heel; legs built to travel hundreds of miles at a time are shuttled by engine and wrapped in chain; bones aching from the shift of massive weight to mimic the squat of a species built so differently; cracked and bleeding feet from the gray on gray on gray on gray. 

 

Dick is nine when he leaves. He leaves into kind, dark arms that stretch and stretch and stretch until they’re big enough to hold everyone. He finds that the Earth is not as stationary as it looks, even if it may be slow, and that the best place to watch the Earth march slowly forward is a home high in the sky. So he gets a pair of wings. 

 

Zitka is twenty-two when she leaves. A camera shutters in the wrong way, perhaps, a shout is too loud, maybe, a car backfires, possibly. Something in Zitka long since pulled taut like a rubber band snaps, and she flings out her trunk and slaps a bystander to the floor. She was filled with infection, leaking blood and pus and hot and painful and swollen to the touch for years now. She kneels and crushes the bystander with her great head, and crashes through the streets, screaming, until she’s finally plugged with enough bullets to fall. She carries no safety net on her back, and she dies easily. She has no wings. The Earth isn’t stationary but it moves slowly, and it is never fast enough for everyone.

 

Dick sees the headline in the news, and a couple tears slip out of the corner of his eye; but it’s been years, now, since he was close to the elephant in the barn. The sensation of craning a neck backwards is awkward; the shoulders shift, that muscle in the neck pulls, the eyes ache in their sockets. So he doesn’t look backwards with his real eyes, but his secret ones, the ones that look at everything in the nice way. A safety net. 

**Author's Note:**

> I know. I know. I know I started out with a poem. I know this reads like a PETA advertisement. I know it's fun-crushing, and that when it comes to the DCU you can't really have everything be 100% realistic. You are totally allowed your fun Zitka-related headcanons, it's cool, it's fine. I won't participate, but I'm not about to tell you not to. 
> 
> This was a bit of an exercise in me writing something that's shorter, giving myself a limit to tell a story. It, uhm. It didn't work.


End file.
